Moving from physical servers to the "cloud" involves a paradigm shift in thinking. Generally in a physical environment you care about each invididual host; they each have their own static IP, you probably monitor them individually, and if one goes down you have to get it back up ASAP. You might think you can just move this infrastructure to AWS and start getting the benefits of the "cloud" straight away. Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy (believe me, I tried). You need think differently when it comes to AWS, and it's not always obvious what needs to be done.

So, inspired by Sehrope Sarkuni's recent post, here's a collection of AWS tips I wish someone had told me when I was starting out. These are based on things I've learned deploying various applications on AWS both personally and for my day job. Some are just "gotcha"'s to watch out for (and that I fell victim to), some are things I've heard from other people that I ended up implementing and finding useful, but mostly they're just things I've learned the hard way.

In a pair of recent papers, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have demonstrated that, for a few specific tasks, it's possible to write computer programs using ordinary language rather than special-purpose programming languages.

A Canadian duo and their Kickstarter-funded, pedal-powered helicopter have won one of the longest-standing challenges in the history of aviation — keeping a human-powered aircraft hovering up in the air at height of at least 9.8 feet, within a 32.8 by 32.8-foot square, for 60 seconds minimum. The challenge, known as the Sikorsky prize, has withstood at numerous failed attempts since it was established in 1980, 33 years ago, even with a $250,000 bounty. But it was finally bested earlier in June by the Atlas, a gigantic human-powered helicopter designed by Cameron Robertson and Todd Reichert, aeronautical engineers from the University of Toronto, who cofounded a company AeroVelo.

The pair funded the construction of their winning aircraft through a successful Kickstarter campaign last year, and just barely managed to beat a rival team from the University of Maryland, whose craft Gamera failed to stay within the square-foot range required by the prize, as Popular Mechanics reports.

darthcamaro writes "Last week, Rain Forrest Puppy (aka Jeff Forristal) first disclosed the initial public report about an Android Master Key flaw. Code was released earlier this week for attackers to exploit the flaw — but what about users? Google has claimed that it has patched the issue but how do you know if your phone/carrier is safe? Forristal's company now has an app for that. But even if your phone is not patched, don't be too worried that risks are limited if you still to a 'safe' app store like Google Play. 'The only way an Android user can be attacked via this master key flaw is if they download a vulnerable application.

"It all comes down to where you get your applications from," Forristal said.'"

“All I want to do is take pictures. I don’t care about anything else,” says celebrated photojournalist Bruce Davidson. The quote is from Cheryl Dunn’s new documentary Everybody Street, which chronicles the masters of New York street photography — from the confrontational Bruce Gilden to hip hop documentarian Ricky Powell. The project has been in the works for a while, and according to the official site, distribution still hasn’t been nailed down, but hopefully the slightly NSFW trailer below can tide you over until its broader release.

Have you ever misremembered an event, while being totally certain it actually happened? Most people have experienced the unreliability of human memory. As it turns out, false memories are very easy to generate. Scientists at the Riken–MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics have created false memories in mice using a procedure they say would also work for humans.

Jason Scott, the well-known digital archivist with archive.org who has previously produced a documentary on bulletin board systems, has turned his attention to Def Con — the Vegas convention that now attracts thousands of hackers (and would-be hackers) each year. Def Con: The Documentary sits down with a number of individuals who've been involved with the event from the start, including "The Dark Tangent" himself, Def Con founder Jeff Moss.

Def Con is familiar territory for Scott, who is a longtime attendee and frequent speaker at the conference — and naturally, assembling the narrative of how the world's largest hacker convention got its start fits in well with his day job of preserving internet history.